Sigma Phi Epsilon
North American collegiate fraternity
Sigma Phi Epsilon (ΣΦΕ), commonly known as SigEp, is a social college fraternity for male college students in the United States. It was founded on November 1, 1901, at Richmond College, which is now the University of Richmond, and its national headquarters remains in Richmond, Virginia. It was founded on three principles: Virtue, Diligence, and Brotherly Love (often abbreviated as "VDBL"). Sigma Phi Epsilon is one of the largest social fraternities in the United States in terms of current undergraduate membership.
History
In the fall of 1900 18-year-old divinity student Carter Ashton Jenkens, the son of a Baptist minister, transferred from Rutgers College in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to Richmond College, a Baptist institution in Richmond, Virginia. At Rutgers Jenkens had been initiated into the Chi Phi fraternity. At Richmond, which did not have a chapter of Chi Phi, Jenkens was part of a group of friends who were meeting regularly under the unofficial name the "Saturday Night Club".
By early October 1901, Jenkens had persuaded the group, which had grown to twelve men, to try to establish a chapter of Chi Phi at Richmond. These men were reportedly spurned by the existing fraternities on campus for their sense of morality (seven of the twelve were studying for the ordained ministry) and for their rural, middle-class backgrounds. Jenkens had convinced the others that their chapter could be different from the other fraternities on campus and assured them that Chi Phi's principles were in line with their own.
“Sigma Phi Epsilon” enters the record as north American collegiate fraternity. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sigma, Epsilon and North can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7512359. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1901 and 1900.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sigma Phi Epsilon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.